A First-Personness Approach to Co-operative Multimodal Interaction

Using natural language in addition to graphical user interfaces is often used as an argument for a better interaction. However, just adding spoken language might not lead to a better interaction. In this article we will look deeper into how the spoken language should be used in a co-operative multimodal interface. Based on empirical investigations, we have noticed that for multimodal information systems efficiency is especially important. Our results indicate that efficiency can be divided into functional and linguistic efficiency. Functional efficiency has a tight relation to solving the task fast. Linguistic efficiency concerns how to make the contributions meaningful and appropriate in the context. For linguistic efficiency user’s perception of firstpersonness [1] is important, as well as giving users support for understanding the interface, and to adapt the responses to the user. In this article focus is on linguistic efficiency for a multimodal timetable information system.